NL West Notes: Padres, D’Backs, Dodgers, Oswalt

The Padres announced that the ownership group led by the Seidler/O’Malley families and Ron Fowler completed the purchase of the team for $800MM. Fowler is the team’s control person and the ownership group includes two sons and two nephews of Peter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ longtime owner. Tom Garfinkel will stay on as the Padres' president and CEO and Josh Byrnes will remain the team’s executive VP and general manager.

Here are today’s NL West links…

The Padres' new owners offered more platitudes than specifics when addressing the media today, Scott Miller of CBSSports.com reports (on Twitter). The owners didn't say where the team's payroll will sit.

The Dodgers continue spending aggressively, but it doesn’t seem to bother the Diamondbacks’ top officials. Managing general partner Ken Kendrick told Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic that he has “no problem competing with these folks." Diamondbacks CEO Derrick Hall said "there is so much more to building a championship team than just exorbitant salaries."

The Diamondbacks will be able to contend with the Dodgers if their young core of starting pitchers can stay healthy and perform, Piecoro writes. If pitchers such as Tyler Skaggs, Wade Miley and Trevor Bauer can continue to pitch effectively as pre-arbitration eligible players, Arizona can spend elsewhere. Relying on young starting pitching isn’t foolproof, but it’s been done before, as Piecoro explains.

Whatever the team’s payroll will be, at least the Padres won’t be on a shoestring budget that has badly impacted the on-field product. Going forward, that figures to leave the Rockies in the dust if they don’t shape up.

One thing everyone seems to be missing about the Dodgers is that the rotation is really bad after Kershaw (who is not as good as he was last year). Kershaw-Capuano-Harang-Blanton-Beckett is hardly a playoff rotation. it’s not even a rotation you would expect to see on a .500 team. Billingsley has been the Dodgers best pitcher since the ASB and his elbow is so swollen they can’t even read an MRI – can you say TJ surgery?Then, you take what was the worst offense in the national league and you add Adrian Gonzalez and Hanley Ramirez and what does it become? An average offense? Maybe slightly above average? This will not be enough to overtake SF especially when 13 of the Dodgers final 31 games are @SF(3), STL (4), @ Cin (3), @WAS (3). The Dodgers better sweep SF because they are going 4-6 at best against the other three while the Giants are playing all sub-.500 teams the rest of the way except for LA. All of this and the Dodgers have to overcome a 4 game deficit. Oh yeah, and it looks like your closer will miss some time as well. The best part is that the trade was made primarily for this year because all four of the players will only get worse and more expensive over the remainder of their contracts. It is going to be great when the Dodgers fall short this year while adding a quarter of a billion dollars to their payroll in declining players. Meanwhile, the Giants lose one of their best players and will still pull away.